Chinese Rocket That Launched Spy Satellites Breaks up Over Texas

Here’s what the Chang Zheng “Long March” rocket looked like taking off from China in June.

The four-ton rocket reentered the atmosphere on Wednesday at 17,000 miles per hour and disintegrated, but it’s only being reported now. While they haven’t found any debris yet from the rocket stage, they’re saying the debris field could be miles wide and hundreds of miles long. It’s not clear what kind of a hazard this could pose, and the Chinese have had issues in the past with space debris like this.

China isn’t talking about its stage falling over Texas. But the rocket could carry up to 8,000 pounds of cargo. Is Biden going to have another talk with them? Or is this all cool, too?

That isn’t looking good, particularly after what happened with their spy balloon trying to surveil the country in February, which got shot down out of the sky after looking at our military installations for a week.

NOT about this story but another one....
NPR, Nov.27, 2022 Debris from another Chinese satellite launch fell uncontrolled back to Earth

A rocket the size of a 10-story building tumbled out of the sky on Friday and splashed into the Pacific Ocean. The debris didn’t cause any casualties, but the rocket’s uncontrolled descent was no accident. The Chinese rocket booster was designed to fall to Earth after propelling a piece of China’s space station into orbit. NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement Friday that China was taking, quote, “unnecessary risks.” Here to talk more about this is Jonathan McDowell with Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics. Hey there.

JONATHAN MCDOWELL: Hello.

NADWORNY: So this is the fourth time that debris from a Chinese rocket has cascaded down to Earth. Several years ago, chunks hit villages in West Africa, causing property damage but no casualties. Is there any way to know where this stuff is going to fall?

MCDOWELL: No, there really isn’t. The problem is that the rocket booster is tumbling along at the edge of the atmosphere at 17,000 miles an hour. So if you estimate wrong when it’s going to break up by an hour, you’re 17,000 miles off.

NADWORNY: Wow.

MCDOWELL: And so it’s that lack of predictability that makes this particularly worrying.

NADWORNY: What are the odds that a piece of rocket debris would actually hurt someone?

MCDOWELL: The chance of it hurting someone is not that high. It’s maybe one in a thousand, but that’s still a lot higher than the criterion that most countries use for going, eh, probably too high a risk to take. If you’re doing a lot of these, even a one in a thousand risk, eventually you’re going to get unlucky.

NADWORNY: Is there a way to make sure that large pieces of debris like this won’t cause loss of life or property?

MCDOWELL: Well, there are various things that people do. If you have a smaller rocket stage, you can make it a restartable (ph) engine and slam it deliberately down into the atmosphere at a specific place in time. For a big booster like this, the usual way people will take care of it is not to put it in orbit in the first place, make it do most of the work of getting your satellite into orbit but shut it down just a little early so that it falls immediately in the ocean at a predictable place and then make little engines on the satellite do the last little puff of getting it into space.

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